If You Think Your Pet Is Ill...

[midori1999]

WWhatever the time, day or night, vets have an emergency out of hours service. You can speak to and explain symptoms to avet who wil tell you if you need to come in as an emergency or if they need to come out and do a home visit.

It is FAR better to look/feel a bit silly in front of your vet because there really is no 'emergency' than to have a sick, dying or suffering pet. If you thought your child might be sick would you worry about looking silly or would you wait until morning to take them to A&E?

Not getting a sick animal to a vet is neglect, pure and simple. I never gfail to be gobsmakced by teh number of people on various forums that I use that aren't aware their vets have an out of hours service or for whatever reason, best known only to them, are reluctant to visit the vets with their animal.

Thankyou very much...the cover for life thing sounds excellent - sadly it would be too late for my cat, as she's already had this problem a few times and each time it's another £50 quid or so, if we've run out of the medicine. That's below excess anyway on most policies I think.

Seeing as she tends to have these run of the mill conditions and hasn't had a major accident yet (she's 11) it seems just more sensible to go with paying for the stuff she needs rather than the just in case stuff.

But thankyou for your help anyway

Flight - my dog has lifetime cover with petplan which started as a pup at £12pm and is now £36pm so you can see how the cost rises over the years.

Flight, if I am correct in thinking your cat gets Metacam for urinary problems, have you asked your vet if they can just do a repeat prescription for you? They will have to examine her regularly in order to satisfy legal requirements - our policy is every 3 months but some practices are ok with 6 monthly checks - but this may work out cheaper. Also check out the Feline Advisory Bureau website - fabcats.something I think - for great info about cats and their bladders!

Thankyou so much for the website tip, also for your advice.
She only gets it about once a year, usually when she is upset about some other cat in the garden or whatever - it lasts a couple of days then she is OK again.

The vet didn't seem to think it was crystals or such, which is good.

I will have a look at the website

We've used our vet's emergency call out service, which as it turns out was just the vets home number. He saw our cat in the middle of the night after he got out and was run over. It was expensive, but then we'd just dragged the poor man out of bed, and we were fairly sure our cat was a gonner. So the fee was really no problem. But then I had a lot of trust in the vet, because he has always been incredibly sensible and down to earth, and never recommended expensive treatment. For example when one of our cats suddenly started to drag her back legs he said that we could have an MRI for it (at some huge cost) or we could give her steroids and see how she went. He said that this would be the most likely treatment even if she did have a brain tumour (the most likely reason he thought) so we had little to gain from the scan. We didn't insure the cats because they rarely had treatment beyond their annual check up and it was fairly affordable (for example when an earlier cat got hit by a car and broke his jaw his treatment for two operations and a fortnight stay at the vet was £300).

On the other hand with our puppy when we took him to the vet (a different one as we have moved) for a limp he had an immediate x-ray (showing nothing) and was given some NSAI drug. He's fine now. The last two times I went to the doctors I was prescribed the same sort of medication (ie ibuprofen), with the instruction to come back for further investigation if the drugs didn't fix it. Given the pup hadn't been limping long and wasn't in any pain I would have rather the vet took the cheap approach before the expensive one. We will probably look for a different vet, although I am aware that dogs seem to be much more expensive than cats.

I have followed this thread with interest and whilst I am aware there are some vets who give the rest of us a bad name the vast majority do it for the love not the money.
Compared to a close friend who is a GP I work between 1.5 and 2 times as many hours as he does and earn only two thirds of the salary that he does. Not to mention how much riskier our profession is, only last week a dog nearly bit me on the face.
I work really hard to help my clients offering payment plans in emergency situations and just last week we launched a scheme enabling the cost of vaccinations, worms and flea treatment to be split over the year (this actually gives me less income, but helps my clients).

Good idea Liz - we need more like you.